


Our Conspiracy of Flightlessness

by theradiointukyshead



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 13:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5786623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theradiointukyshead/pseuds/theradiointukyshead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a boy who’s barely a god that keeps finding dumb excuses to be near a girl who’s a healer of the realms. These immortals find their hearts in the wrong place, which makes a certain one-handed Emperor of the gods very unhappy. (Or: an interpretation of the myth of Vega and Altair, two of the brightest stars in the sky that are separated by the Milky Way Galaxy.)</p>
<p>“I do love him, yes, and it hurts, just the same. This is not a love story, not the one they make fairytales out of and tell children before bed. Ours is a story of almosts, and in the repertoire of stories humankind has accumulated over the span of its existence, no one ever remembers those who almost made it.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Conspiracy of Flightlessness

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr on May 27, 2015 as a birthday gift for Cindy/youremorethanthatjemma.

The girl is eighteen, pale and temperate as a crescent moon, when news of her healing power reach the realm of heaven. A very impressed Jade Emperor sends his messenger – the goddess of truth – to summon her to his palace for a small favor; he is quite fond of his left hand, which was lost in the leaping flames of battle amongst factions of heavenly gods. Swayed neither by her parents’ plea nor the comfort of the familiar, she chooses to be untethered from earth, ascending with the goddess, whose third all-seeing eye holds vague melancholy for the girl that belies her stoic demeanor.

She proves her worth by growing a hand back from the stump on the grieving Emperor’s arm. In return, he promises her a forever in his kingdom, as long as she never returns to the mortal realm, an offer which she graciously accepts.

On this side of paradise, she spends her days in a gazebo on a low emerald hill, overlooking miles and miles of meadow, guarding the lives of those she loves on earth, tending to reckless gods who confuse immortality with invincibility.

The goddess of truth often stops by the gazebo during her early morning stroll. May, she’s called. Like the month that follows nature’s rebirth and precedes its blazing life. She tucks a lock of onyx hair back as the sun rises between far-off mountains. By her side, the girl fiddles with her tea set.

“Why did you choose to stay?” May asks. Her third eye remains fixated on the horizon, slowly blinking, impassive, like it already knows the answer.

The girl hands May a cup of tea and takes a sip from her own cup. “Mortals and gods all need saving, and here, I can save both.”

The gold-red light casts a shadow on May’s face, rendering her features older and twice as forlorn. Perhaps she carries the sorrow of knowing too much and much too soon. The eye on her forehead slowly closes. “You love and care more than you can, more than you should, and that is your downfall.”

*

There is a boy who’s barely a god, slender as a willow tree. He makes weapons and delivers them to the gods, golden swords and silver bows and shiny armors, though he himself is dressed humbly. Every other day he would gallop across the meadow on his horse, and the girl watches him from afar with the same tender curiosity people have when they stretch their arm to catch a shooting star.

On this particular afternoon, the sound of hooves thundering on the ground draws close to where she is, and she turns to see the boy dismount from his horse.

“I hurt myself trying to weld a new mallet for the god of thunder,” he holds out his disfigured hand, looking almost apologetic. “I am told you are the best healer in the heavenly realm. Can you please help me?”

And help him she does. She uses her power to make his wounds seal shut. He’s quiet while she works her meticulous fingers, and every time she looks up she can only catch the lingering end of his stare, before he quickly tears it away from her to look straight ahead.

She seizes the opportunity to study his face, noting the way seasons weave themselves into him, youthfulness akin to spring showers, eyes as clear as the summer sky, hair the color of autumn leaves at twilight, and skin like a snow-kissed winter. In his own way, he is beautiful.

“You’re staring,” he comments. His lips twitch like he’s fighting off a smile.

“Sorry,” the girl murmurs, embarrassment tinting her cheeks crimson. “It’s just that you’re quite – ah – different from the other gods.”

“Oh,” he lowers his eyes, long lashes brushing against pale, papery cheeks. “Different how?”

“Less haughty, for starters. You’re the first one to ask nicely for my help,” she answers. His wounds have now healed, and she sits straight up, leveling her eyes with his. “And more real. A more tangible existence, I suppose. Like if I close my eyes and open them again you’ll still be there. Like if I touch you, you won’t dissolve into smoke.”

She blinks. She ghosts her hand over his. And he’s still there.

They talk, they share stories, they sneak glances until the sun dips over a clear horizon and the moon takes its place.

Before he leaves, he breaks off a small branch and turns it over in his hands. When he’s finished, the branch is no longer a branch. He holds a metal hair pin the length of a hand up, and the crystalized gemstone on its end catches the soft light, gleaming in the dark.

“For you, healer of the realms, girl of starlight” says he, as he closes her fingers around the pin. She tries to ignore the burst of warmth at the places where they touch. “Until we meet again.”

 *

And they do meet again. Every few days he would show up at her gazebo bearing a different injury. His horse huffs impatiently, for he is so prone to outstaying what the horse deems is his welcome. It is not wholly his fault; the girl does more than just fixing him up, and their conversation remains adrift well into the night.

“For a god, you get hurt so often that it’s alarming,” she teases, as she snaps a bone in his finger back into place.

“Yeah, well, I work a dangerous job,” he puffs out his chest, though he can’t quite hide how his ears have turned scarlet. “Forging a sword can be just as demanding as wielding one in combat.”

She rolls her eyes in good humor. Silence briefly passes before they lapse into easy banter that has no end, his broken bone long mended.

Tonight, he tells her about the lonely days in his workshop striking metal, trapped between the war game of gods. She doesn’t ask him about war stories, because she knows war stories belong only to the dead. Instead, she listens, and when he’s finished, she merely sighs, “how ironic it is that you are the armorer and I am the healer.”

He gives her a sad smile. “It could have been different, you know. If the ego of gods wasn’t so fragile, maybe they would have realized my weapons were designed to protect, not to kill.”

“And yet your weapons still hurt you.” She motions to his hand, a smirk tugging at her lips.

“Ah, I really should be more careful.”

“You do realize that you don’t have to keep hurting yourself to see me, right?”

He blushes, trying but failing to stammer out a response. She just laughs, a sound as silvery as the jeweled half-light pouring through the leaves of a banyan tree.

 *

May raises an eyebrow when she stops by one morning to find three steaming cups of tea instead of two. “Expecting company?” she asks.

“Somehow I suspect you already know the answer,” the girl quips. “You’re the goddess of truth, not me.”

May’s third eye blinks like it refuses to get the joke. The girl exhales. “Yes, the god of armament should be joining us for tea shortly. He’s around often, nowadays.”

There are stars in her eyes and sun in her smile, and May turns away like it pains her to look at such feverish hope. “Remember what I told you, healer. Remember what brings about your downfall.”

 *

The first time they kiss, she’s in the middle of reliving her childhood memories, of summer-gilded days and humid nights scampering barefoot through tall grass to chase the moon. She’s in a melancholic trance, all vivaciousness and fervor, she doesn’t notice how he looks at her like she is stellar explosion incarnate. It is only when she feels his lips against her own that reality shimmers and ebbs away, and when she returns the kiss she’s sure there’s no better taste than his breathless laughter in her mouth.

His fingers are still grazing her cheek when he pulls away and leans against her forehead. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “I should’ve asked you first.”

“You should be apologizing,” she grins, placing a peck on the corner of his lips. “I wasn’t finished talking.”

He lowers his head and motions for her to continue. As the memories roll in in waves, she grows strangely nostalgic for a mortal realm riddled with misery, an oddity which he notes with a twinge of confusion.

“Nostalgia is a side effect of homesickness, god-boy,” she breathes. “I never did learn to love my home until I left it behind.”

He turns to her, catches the sorrow in her eyes that she fails to mask, and under this half-moon she looks translucent, almost like a ghost. He ventures shakily, “Do you want to come home? Just for a while?”

“It’s against the rules for me to go back.”

His face falls, but he nods. “I understand. But my offer will always stand, should you ever want to take me up on it.”

“And risk the wrath of the Jade Emperor?” she’s incredulous. “I’d never imagine that you are the law-breaking type.”

“I am my best and I am my worst when I’m with you, and sometimes, I think they are not that different,” he responds, and in the flickering dark of night, she thinks he sounds almost sad.

 *

She ends up accepting his offer, after all. Her village is crippled by an incurable disease, because humans are creatures of irony, with the courage of stars and the bodily strength of flightless dreamers who grow shoulder blades instead of wings. One by one people drop like flies, fast and sudden, and she weeps bitter tears when her healing power fails to work.  

“Take me back,” she demands, no sooner has her horse come to a halt in front of his workshop.

He’s tempering a jian sword, but he wipes the sweat off his forehead and looks up, only to be met with tear-stained cheeks and red, angry eyes. He barks orders to his subordinates to take over his work and – in one swift movement – takes her by the waist, plunging headfirst through shapeless clouds, until they are earthbound at last.

He doesn’t ask questions, but she can feel his palpitating heart demanding to be free from his ribcage, and she buries her head in his shoulder as he tears apart the air in their rush.

“There’s a disease that has just struck my village,” she whispers against his skin.

He hums, but doesn’t say a word.

“Everyone I know is dying and I can’t heal them all, not from afar, anyway,” she continues. “At the very least, I want to be there and hold their hand as they breathe their last breath.”

At this, he turns and presses a reassuring kiss on the crown of her head. “Hey, nobody’s dying. You won’t let them. You are incapable of not caring, and that alone is enough.”

“What if it’s not, god-boy?” she chokes. “What if it’s not?”

 *

They arrive in time to stop the last outbreak, and she wins the tug-of-war with the god of disease, who grudgingly lets go of souls tethering the line between life and death. She breathes a sigh of relief and gives her armorer a triumphant grin, and his strange blue eyes twinkle back from the shadow.

It is only when her parents inform her that her childhood friend is dead that the grin falters. On the ground, the boy with an easy smile and skin the color of the earth after rain is motionless, one limp body amongst countless others waiting to be buried.

She wails like she’s breathing for them both. The disease has turned his skin into fragments, and her hot tears fall into the cracks, trickling down his lifeless face. Her hands feel as if they are on fire, glowing amber and gold and blood red.

_Your human heart, your goddess heart_ , the wind hisses through emerald canopies. _You must choose._

“I choose both!” the girl growls. She holds her hands over her dead friend’s chest, just as they burst into light. Bystanders cower, fearfully awed by such blinding brilliance. Next to her, the god of armament places a hand on her shoulder to steady them both.

When the light finally fades, her friend is staring up at her, blinking in confusion. Agape, she lunges forward to envelop him in a breathless hug. “I thought I’d lost you,” she mutters over and over.

There it is again, that easy smile. “Come on girl, you know I’d never leave you like that.”

Her lips part for a light-hearted response, but it is not halfway out when the whole world around them rumbles. Then thunder. Then everything tastes like ash. Then the ache of nothingness closes in on her.

 *

The space where she wakes up is not a space. There’s a certain listlessness to it, and it takes her a while to realize she’s floating in limbo.  A few feet away, the boy groans as he sits up to stare at her, and even when all around them is the void his eyes are still the same shade of blue in which she would gladly drown.

“What happened?” he frowns. “Where are we?”

“Limbo,” she answers, though she doesn’t know how they got here.

The air in front of them quivers, before the Jade Emperor himself materializes. Next to him, the goddess of truth stands, sorrow heavy on her lids.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” he begins. He looks impassive, but not merciful.

“I’ve saved people’s lives,” counters the girl, quiet but certain.

He shakes his head. “You left the heavenly realm without my permission. You brought a man back to life. You cheated death.”

“I will take full responsibility for leaving. But with all due respect, Sir,” she takes a step forward, “I will not apologize for what I did to the people in my village. To my friend.”

The Emperor is calm, but in the way the sea calms itself before a tsunami. “You can gamble with mortality all you want, but you can’t rig the die. Humans are born, they live, they die, they rise again in flowers or in the song of birds. But there’s a cycle and if you think you are entitled to break it, you have abused your power as the goddess of protection.”

“If it makes any difference, Sir,” the boy speaks up at last, “it was my idea to bring her back to earth.”

“You don’t have to take the fall for –”

“Look at you two,” says the Emperor, cutting her off. “The armorer and the healer. Whoever made you tangled irony in your veins. Very well, then.”

He turns to May with a meaningful look. The goddess waves her hand, and they are once again back in her village, only now it is nighttime, the desolated landscape devoid of humans. The Emperor orders them both to their knees, then reaches for her head and plucks something out. The boy kneeling beside her fails to stifle a dismayed gasp as her hair tumbles down her shoulders; in the Emperor’s palm is her hairpin, the one with a crystallized gemstone the boy has fashioned for her from a tree branch on the night they first met.

“I trusted you two to be different, to be the ones that stay gold even when those power-crazed gods have turned the whole of heaven into dirt,” the Emperor scolds. “I’ve been amputated. I’ve been stabbed through the heart by a frenzied god. Nothing hurts as much as your betrayal.”

He points the hairpin skyward. “This is your punishment,” he roars. Then, he slashes the fabric of the sky.

Stars seep through the gash, bleeding silver and pale gold onto the darkness. From where they are standing on earth, it looks like there is a river swirling with stellar dust across the night sky. It is radiant, but for some reason, its radiance hurts her head.

“This is the Silver River,” the Emperor declares, his face expressionless. “From now on, you will be separated by it, never to see each other again.”

They both leap to their feet, ready to protest, but the Emperor shoots them a glare, and they are suddenly besieged with a pain that makes them fall back onto their knees. “My decision is final,” he barks. “You have tonight to say goodbye. Spend your time wisely.”

There’s an unfathomable look in the eyes of the goddess of truth as she turns and walks away, but it is so fleeting that the girl is not quite sure if it was there to begin with. And in a moth’s flap of wings, she and the Jade Emperor have disappeared.

 *

They have no idea what they’re doing. Their teeth rattle and their lips clash and their hands implore like they themselves are grains of sand to each other’s desperate fingers. Their movement knows not of rhythm nor grace when they crumble onto the mattress in her empty childhood home, but when his breath hovers over her collarbones, ragged and hungry like a staccato to their unfinished symphony, she finds that she doesn’t have the mind to care. It is, after all, the night that they call their last, and she is determined to forget it is also the night of tear-soaked dreams.

They shed their clothes like old feathers, they drink each other in like absinthe. _Poison to my liver, cure to my heart_ , she thinks with her last shreds of consciousness as she arches up into him. _I’d savor your taste as we write naked poetry in the dark with the tips of our fingers._

Afterwards, they lie wide awake, and she tells him the fairytales from a simpler time, of princes and princesses and their happily-ever-afters, of dragons and phoenixes and golden sunsets that never end. She doesn’t stop talking, because if she stops she thinks reality will start closing in, and that is a pain she would not want to suffer.

When her voice is spent, he trades stories of gods for her fairytales. He talks of myths and legends, of the foolish mishaps in his younger years when the newfound knowledge of immortality made him high like it was a drug.

“And then there’s you,” he concludes in a hushed voice. “You have made things – ah – more complicated.”

Her fingertips dance up and down his chest. “How?”

“We are gods, and gods can’t die. And for a while I thought it was enough, this promise of forever,” says he, motioning to a stars-kissed patch of sky outside the window, past the jut of her shoulder. “But that was before I learn forever takes the shape of a girl. And what is the point of living in this meaningless temporal construct that they call infinite, when my true forever is lost to me?”

“When you put it that way, god-boy, death does not sound so bad,” she confesses.

His lips twitch, but there’s no mirth. “Maybe it’s not. In its own kingdom, death can be kind. A neat end to all suffering, at the very least.”

When she wakes up, streaks of glowing red are beginning to trickle through the window, and he is reaching for her again.

“Forever,” he croaks, the word on his lips half like a prayer and half like a curse. They dissolve into each other’s touch, and the room is brighter but the shadows are longer and he tastes like sea water and ashes of stars. They’re both crying, desperate and clumsy, it feels like they’re making love amidst an implosion at the end of the world.

*

For a while, time passes like it is all full stops and anger, days blurring into months blurring into years. After the first few years, she stops keeping track; immortality has that sort of numbing effect. She finds herself back in her gazebo up the hill, only this time the meadow below it has been replaced by a river that courses silver starlight. When night falls and the rest of heaven is cloaked in a dull black, there’s still one amber dot of light on the other side of the river. She likes to believe it is the fire from his workshop. What cruel tricks fate has for her, when she’s cursed to lifetimes spent reaching for a pale dot.

The goddess of truth goes to her one lonely evening on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, when she has just finished patching up the wound of a young fairy.

“I found something amongst the trinkets in the Emperor’s drawer,” May hesitates, her third eye downcast and bashful. “I thought you would want it.”

May holds out the hairpin the Emperor once took away to tear the sky apart. The gemstone on its end is golden in the lamplight. The girl traces delicate ornaments on her pin, before holding it out for the gemstone to align it with the amber light across the river. It blinks, a thousand crystallized sunbeams splintering everywhere. She allows a rare half-smile, holding the pin close to her heart.

“You love him,” May murmurs. It is a statement.

“Does it make a difference?”

The goddess smiles ruefully. “It does to the boy waiting beneath that flickering pale light. It does to me. I need to hear you say it.”

“I do love him, yes, and it hurts, just the same,” the girl answers, toying with the hairpin between her fingers. “This is not a love story, May, not the one they make fairytales out of and tell children before bed. Ours is a story of almosts, and in the repertoire of stories humankind has accumulated over the span of its existence, no one ever remembers those who almost made it.”

And it is true. She loves him the way a fractured morning after is full of too sad and too much longing, the way a melancholic traveler marvels at the place he sees for the first and last time. Like saying the word “it’s enough” only to realize that it’s not, that you’ve used up the air and there’s a void in your lungs where it should have been. Like making dinner plans for two and sit at a table for one to drink wine and hold the hand of a ghost. Almost is a story not good enough to be remembered.

May nods, like she already knows the answer. And maybe she does. There’s a glint in her third omniscient eye that the girl can’t quite read. “So that means you regret it, going back to earth and cheating death at its own game?” May questions.

The girl muses. _Your goddess heart, your human heart_ , the wind sings once again. The lump in her throat is growing by the second.

“I regret bringing him into the mess I made,” she admits finally, though she is resolute, “but I will never regret saving lives, even after it cost me everything I love.”

“That’s all I need to know,” May replies.

Then, she hears it: the rapid flapping of a thousand wings.

From the distance, flock after flock of magpies rattle the silence as they slowly converge on the Silver River, the strips of white feather on their wings and stomachs illuminating this part of the night sky. Soon, they form a bridge across the river of falling stars, heading straight for the pale amber dot.

“I made a deal with the Jade Emperor. He agreed for the river to be bridged once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. Only then and then alone can you two meet,” May explains. “I know it’s not much, but it will have to do.”

“May, I –” the girl sputters.

“Go to him, healer,” the goddess interrupts. The sentence is barely finished when her senses are filled with brown hair and soft touches, as the girl crashes into her for a breathless embrace. For the first time, May’s smile reaches the eye on her forehead.

So the girl goes. She crosses the bridge of magpies, watches as the amber light grows brighter, bigger, her heart a wild horse galloping in her chest, until she’s standing in front of a metal workshop glowing with fire from a burning hearth.

He’s alone in his shop, dunking a spearhead in cool water, sweats peppering his forehead. He doesn’t age, none of them does, but the stubble on those hard-set jaws renders him more tempered, if not severe. In a way, it is his armor against the stabs of the world.

“Hey,” she begins almost stupidly.

The boy looks up. The sweats dewing on his lashes do nothing to dim those ardent blue eyes, and here in front of the hearth, he is haloed by leaping tendrils of flame, half god, half supernova.

In two strides he closes the gap, and their lips meet that desperate way all ravenous, tear-stained kisses do. She fists a hand through his hair and pulls him closer, closer, until his essence is all she can taste, until the waves pull them both under, and they sink to the blissful depth of not-being.

*

Somewhere on earth, there’s an old man with an easy smile and skin the color of the earth after rain, whose face is still slightly fractured and chest is burned in the shape of two hands, but he wears his deformities like a badge of honor for the time he cheated death.

Tonight, he sits by the dock and bounces a little girl on his knees. She’s butchering the names of constellations the only way a five-year-old can, trailing her chubby finger along the strip of stars that seem to divide up the firmament.

“Grandpa, what is that?” she glances up at him.

“Ah, girl, that’s the Milky Way Galaxy,” he replies. “And the two brightest stars on opposite sides of the Milky Way are Vega and Altair.”

“Milky Way,” the girl repeats, testing out the strange new words on her tongue, “Vega, Altair.”

“Once upon a time there was a girl who fell in love with a boy,” the old man continues, “and it took an entire galaxy to keep them apart.”

“Did they get to see each other again?”

“They did. They do,” he smiles that easy smile. “Every year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, magpies make a bridge for them to cross the river of stars. It’s why you never see magpies around that time of year; they have all flocked to heaven to build the bridge. And the lovers weep, too, tears of joy that fall down to earth, drenching the land throughout the seventh month.”

The girl tilts her head. “But it rains so much these past few days. Do you think they’re meeting up in heaven right now, grandpa?”

The old man looks up to the sky, at pinpricks of star that have traveled since the beginning of time just to reach their eyes. How many of them tell their own stories? How much love do they carry across the years? At last, he answers, “Yes. Yes, I think they are.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story is basically Vietnamese folklore thrown in a blender. The original fairytale can be found at http://www.wingsof100viet.org/milkyway.htm if you're interested.
> 
> Also, you may have noticed that apart from May, nobody has a name in this story. That's because it feels weird for me to use Western names in an Asian fairytale.


End file.
